"As you read Culling, you experience George Held's deep and intimate relationship with nature. His intense gifts of observation, and ability to transform his subjects, create poems that breathe yet suspend time. This amazing book, with its ecstasy and despair, is a plaintive cry, a howl, and a call to action for all those who care about what remains of this fragile, endangered world. These poems are exquisite. They instantly seduce the reader. You will be captured by their skill, precise vision, emotional truth, and subtle humor." -- GLADYS HENDERSON, author of Eclipse of Heaven "Whether cultivating and culling apples or poems, George Held does so with impeccable care, craft, and precision, adhering to the rule that in life as in art, 'To keep is easy, to discard is hard.' Here is a collection of nature poems by a masterful poet whose body and mind, with senses alert, labor to produce crop after bountiful crop, work not done until his rake or his pen at last drops." -- KOON WOON, author of Water Chasing Water "In this time of unabashed 'me-ism, ' it is a great pleasure to read George Held's Culling. This collection is like a treatise on paying attention to what's outside, finding joy in the nature we too often forget. Held's writing is in the tradition of those other knife-eyed watchers, Neruda and Ponge. A consummate artist, he writes so deftly that the words seem to have written themselves, in perfect order, opening the path to new ways of seeing." -- BERTHA ROGERS, author of Heart Turned Back
